Chris Christie trapped himself in a political quandary

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R). Reuters/Brendan McDermid Many presidential candidates claim to be brave "truth tellers," but few have cultivated the image over the past several years as aggressively as has New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who officially kicked off his campaign on Tuesday.

"I am not running for president of the United States as a surrogate for the elected prom king of America," Mr. Christie said.

"When I stand up on stages like this in front of all of you, there is one thing you will know for sure: I mean what I say and I say what I mean and that is what America needs right now."

From the beginning of his rise, Mr. Christie has cultivated a frank — even rude — persona, scolding people in town-hall meetings. In Trenton, Mr. Christie set out to trim public pension benefits to get the state's books in order. Now his signature policy issue is reforming Social Security.

"We need to fix the broken entitlement system," he declared, saying that politicians have lied to Americans about the scale of the country's obligations. "The horse is out of the barn. You can only get it back in by force." He's right, though these days saying so in a Republican primary takes less courage than does acknowledging the need for higher taxes as the population ages.

Mr. Christie also insisted Tuesday that "compromise" can't be a "dirty word" in politics. "If Washington and Adams and Jefferson had believed that was a dirty word, we would still be under the crown of England," he said. This sentiment summoned a kind of no-nonsense Republicanism concerned with governing, not throwing ideological tantrums, that we hope the eventual GOP nominee will embrace.

One price of staking your campaign on telling hard truths and governing straightforwardly is that every deviation from those ideals becomes fair fodder. And there are deviations in Mr. Christie's record. He flip-flopped on Common Core, giving in to overblown right-wing objections to the state-driven educational standards.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie Reuters He hedged on requiring children to get vaccinated when, for a moment, it seemed as though the libertarian wing of the GOP demanded it. He pulled New Jersey out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multi-state carbon pricing program that both combated harmful greenhouse gas emissions and produced revenue the state used to balance its budget.

Meanwhile, even though Mr. Christie's reforms helped, New Jersey's pension system is still broken, and after his "Bridgegate" scandal, it doesn't look like he has the political capital to achieve more change.

This leaves Mr. Christie in a political quandary. With trouble at home and a less-attractive record to GOP voters than he'd hoped for, Mr. Christie enters the race outside the top tier of candidates. Gruffness isn't a platform. But if Mr. Christie really becomes an evangelist for practicality over dogma in governing, he could become a constructive force in his party.